Vanagon Ventures, a German DeepTech VC agency, has introduced the ultimate closing of its €20 million Fund I to again B2B startups from pre-Seed tackling elementary system-level challenges and creating totally new classes enabled by AI and DeepTech.
The fund is backed by Allocator One. Additional LPs embody household places of work and HNWIs, senior tech executives from corporations equivalent to Apple and Google.
Vanagon writes preliminary tickets of as much as €500k in groups constructing options that advance Europe’s sovereignty and sustainability, with a give attention to spatial and AI, quantum computing, robotics and frontier software program.
“Most early-stage funds aren’t constructed for pre-Seed. They discuss conviction however await proof. We didn’t begin Vanagon simply to be like an previous VC agency. We constructed Vanagon from the bottom as much as again relentless founders on their life’s mission from day one,” says Sandro Stark, GP at Vanagon.
In a broader European context, Vanagon Ventures’ Fund I closes towards a backdrop of continued early-stage exercise in AI and DeepTech throughout 2025 and early 2026.
In Germany, U2V, a spin-off from Earlybird-X, launched a €60 million fund to help pre-Seed and Seed DeepTech startups rising from European technical universities. Additionally in Germany, Munich-based yasp raised €4.2 million to advance its agentic AI compiler, signalling ongoing investor curiosity in foundational AI tooling. Past Germany, Paris-based Arago secured €22.1 million to develop photonic chips aimed toward decreasing the vitality consumption of AI workloads.
On the fund facet, Munich-based Ananda Impact Ventures introduced a €73 million first near again European affect and DeepTech startups.
Taken collectively, these disclosed rounds and fundraises characterize roughly €160 million flowing into AI- and DeepTech-adjacent exercise throughout this era, situating Vanagon Ventures’ new fund inside a wider pattern of European capital more and more concentrating on pre-Seed and early-stage applied sciences that fall exterior conventional SaaS scaling fashions, with Germany that includes prominently amongst each fund managers and funded corporations.
“AI modifications every part – additionally VC investing: the steepest worth creation is shifting to the earliest phases, our candy spot. But many VCs draw back from pre-Seed as they nonetheless depend on SaaS playbooks that don’t match the scaling logic of DeepTech and AI-native disruption in B2B,” provides Susanne Fromm, GP at Vanagon.
Vanagon Ventures was based in 2023 on the conviction that the subsequent era of extremely impactful know-how corporations is not going to emerge from conventional SaaS playbooks. As a substitute, that they are going to be constructed by founders with deep area experience in ‘old-world’ industries who leverage superior applied sciences to re-architect these methods from the bottom up.
The fund seems to handle a structural hole within the enterprise market: the shortage of devoted capital and conviction on the pre-Seed stage for AI-native and DeepTech corporations that, because of disruption, have large financial potential however completely different scaling logics than conventional software program corporations.
Vanagon Ventures is led by its three Basic Companions, who mix enterprise expertise with publicity to technology-driven transformation throughout industries:
- Axel Roitzsch is a serial entrepreneur with full cycle expertise.
- Sandro Stark, a former Microsoft strategist, who co-founded a parametric local weather insurance coverage.
- Susanne Fromm, an INSEAD MBA alum, has 15 years of company innovation, technique, and tech funding expertise.
“DeepTech, lengthy a European energy, now stands as a cornerstone of sovereignty and the driving power behind the subsequent wave of innovation. Half of the world’s high innovation clusters are in Europe and enterprise capital is the quickest technique to flip that innovation into financial energy. Going all-in is a no brainer,” says Axel Roitzsch, GP at Vanagon.
Fund I targets a portfolio of roughly 30 corporations and has already invested in a number of corporations, together with:
- Holy Applied sciences, an AI-enabled engineering firm that’s rethinking how high-performance parts are manufactured in Europe.
- ExoMatter, a German Aerospace Heart spin-out offering DAX prospects with an AI-powered R&D, as covered by EU-Startups in 2024.
- The Landbanking Group, an AI-driven platform enabling corporations to measure, handle, and monetize pure capital, laying the groundwork for biodiversity and ecosystem integrity as a brand new asset class.
Different notable investments embody glass-based knowledge storage enabling immutable sustainable archiving, AI visible inspection for zero-defect manufacturing, and AI demand forecasting for the chemical and textile industries.
